Canary in a Coal Mine Kickstarter Campaign Reaches $200,000!

With only 30 hours left of her fundraising campaign, Jennifer Brea's full-length documentary, Canary in a Coal Mine, has reached $202,000 on Kickstarter, four times more than the original goal of $50,000 needed to make the film. Over 2,400 people have backed the project, and 85 have left comments expressing their gratitude to Jennifer for undertaking this monumental task.

This is an unprecedented outpouring of support from the ME/CFS community, reflecting our need to make the realities of this illness known to a wide audience.

For those who are not familiar with the platform Jennifer used to fund her project, Kickstarter is a fund-raising platform for independent filmmakers, as well as artists, writers, designers - anyone who has a vision, and needs support to make that vision real. Since its launch in 2009, 5.2 million people have pledged $884 million, funding 52,000 creative projects. Canary in a Coal Mine is one of them.

"In Canary in a Coal Mine, Jennifer documents her own story and the stories of Jessica, a young British woman who runs a children's charity from the room that has been her whole world for the last eight years, Howard, an 80s rock publicist-polymath, Mary, an activist, Liisa, a Canadian ex-buddhist monk, and Leeray and Casie, a mother and daughter bedridden in Georgia. Through extreme diets, experimental medication, political activism, or by moving closer, or farther, from God, each struggles to find their own way to fight, accept, and sometimes, even thrive in spite of 'an illness that has no end.'"